“When H.R. Fricker, the
Curator of the Alpstein Museum, Appenzell Canton, Switzerland, heard of my
practice of bringing a small pocket polished stone home from work each day to my
beloved, and had been doing this for the last twenty years of my employment on
the railroad, he requested she make a selection from the collection and donate
it to the museum. This is poor documentation of her selection, and pictures of
the containers in which she placed them. Each daily peeble, representing a day
of my life, was viewed alternately as a gage d’amour, or love offering, and an
existential exercise equivalent to a mark on a jailhouse wall anticipating the
release from the wretched railroad. My irresolute ponderings on the correct
stone to present necessitated carrying multiple stones which polished them.
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This area, being on the boundary line of the southward edge of the
glaciers of the ice age, and its grinding traverse of the continent in
geological time, there was ample opportunity to do a first edit along the
tracksides of my travail. Of course there were Bible scholars I worked with who
viewed this notion as pagan because God made each and everything in creation in
six days, and the universe was only about 5000 years old, leaving no time for
rocks to be sculpted into aesthetic shapes for my silly romantic endeavor.  So,
this measure of time from my life can be either a short term God-made object of
my free-will selection, or a cold austere blank philosopher’s stone that no
longer had the warmth of my pocket. You decide. Either way, this collection is
very heavy for an old man to lug downstairs for this photo op”...  href="http://www.northbankfred.com/stamp1.html">buZ blurr